ah, let us mourn, for never morrow shall dawn upon him...
[This post is open for reactions, (short) threads, and thread-hopping.]
As the clock chimes its twelfth hour and midnight descends upon Chicago, so, too, does something else.
The man who suddenly finds himself in the Kashtta's barricaded hallway is dreadfully pale, painfully gaunt, and utterly bewildered. His suit, once fashionable and expensive and ( Read more... )
As the clock chimes its twelfth hour and midnight descends upon Chicago, so, too, does something else.
The man who suddenly finds himself in the Kashtta's barricaded hallway is dreadfully pale, painfully gaunt, and utterly bewildered. His suit, once fashionable and expensive and ( Read more... )
He tried to leave without her, but she started throwing herself at her cage incessantly. It isn't fair to try to protect her from any potential threat as much as he needs to. Harry doesn't want to lose her, a second time, and he is already aware of her sacrificial tendencies.
Harry steps through the hallway with his wand out, light at the end of it. It is starting to feel like they all have gone mad. There is nothing-- no sign of what made that noise.
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"Harry! Are you alright?" she asks, as is the requisite form of greeting whenever something has happened. She cannot help herself.
Hermione worries.
She envelops him in a quick hug and draws back, the worry only slightly etched onto her features. "I haven't found much of anything, have you?"
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"Yeah, I'm fine," he assures her with a small smile because he knows why she asks. "It startled me, but... that's all. Hedwig seems more shaken than I am." Which is what worries him. "What about you?"
She worries, and she always has but especially as of late, especially in their later years at Hogwarts.
Harry hugs her back tight and then shakes his head, adjusting his glasses and lifting his wand in the direction down the hallway. "I haven't at all. It didn't seem to be coming from anywhere. It was everywhere or I'd go in the direction of it instead of wandering aimlessly."
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Crookshanks didn't seem to be fairing much better, either.
"That does seem to be the problem," Hermione says in agreement, and she has her own wand at the ready, illuminating the expansive corridor before them. "The noise itself was resounding if not fleeting, but it didn't come from any one particular direction."
Everywhere at once, which hardly makes any sense. One can already see the wheels in her head turning as she starts to walk once more with Harry by her side.
"We will simply have to work our way up. I promised Ms. Jones I would place protective wards around the Tower for the time being, to give her and the rest some peace of mind."
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"Yes, much as I'd like to run off in one direction and find whatever it is, there's no way of knowing where it came from. And-- It's too bad there isn't any way of us finding out if it sounded as loud in all portions of the Tower," he says, as Hedwig takes flight again, circling down by where they've just come from and then flying back to land again. "Where were you? Did it seem loud to you?"
Not that they can really garner how loud it was.
"It just-- it didn't seem like it came through a wall or anything from another room. It was like it was in my room somehow, but nothing was happening ( ... )
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There must be security systems that capture video and sound from different areas in several of the hallways. It's a matter of studying them, and she tells Harry this as they walk.
It might not help them find out if it was as loud in every corner, but they might see something. A blur, some movement, something to infer as to what it could be. "I was in one of the common rooms, and it was frighteningly loud, as if the noise itself was in the room with me ( ... )
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It used to be something he couldn't understand in the least, but now he's come to appreciate that trait about her so much. She's right about there being security cameras. There must be, and he tells her so.
If they can find out anything at all, it would be worth installing them in the first place. "...and the common rooms aren't exactly next door to our rooms," Harry says. They're not far either, but they're not so close that they would both sound like the noise was coming from within the room. "What does that mean then?"
She won't know obviously, but he has to voice the question out loud.
"I don't like it either, and we're completely out of our element. Everyone is in a sense because it's the Rift," Harry says, and there's no telling what could come through it or what it could do. He follows her down the vast hallway ( ... )
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Once she reads Luna's comment about a man and the name Roderick--not to mention, once things continue to happen, the narration is fairly certain Hermione will catch on quickly as to who it is and what could happen.
Which doesn't mean they might be able to stop it, however...
"Those who've responded to the entry all seem to believe the very same thing. The noise was close to them, and none of us were in the same place at once," Hermione says. It doesn't make any sense, and she likes when things make proper sense, thank you. She looks over at Harry, a bit uneasy, and shakes her head.
"I don't know yet," she says, and the keyword for Hermione here is yet.Hermione slows down almost imperceptibly before she charges forward again, meeting his gaze. "It's so ( ... )
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He follows the length of the hallway, looking up and down the hallway. Harry does not see anything out of the ordinary at all, and he hates that more than anything else. If there was something that indicated a change, they could go with that ( ... )
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Harry's correct that it is beyond their scope of experience.
Magic is something they could both undertake rather easily, but Chicago has proven difficult in that respect, not because their isn't magic, but because nothing follows a certain norm or pattern.
It's all very much a wild card, and makes it that much more of a challenge.
Not that Hermione is deterred.
"It changes things for us all," Hermione says quietly. He's not the Boy Who Lived here. Or rather, he is not in the way that he was back home, in the non-fictional sense. There's no war with Voldemort. So many things have changed. So many people they've had to learn to live without.
The both of them.
"Harry..." Hermione says in that bossy tone of hers the moment he starts toward the hallway, completely ( ... )
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It's an unearthly sort of sound, one that's sure to shake the two wizards down to their bones.
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Hermione gasps and instinctively takes a step back, but then she's immobilized in place. The sound echoes through the hallway and it rattles her very bones. Her wand remains drawn as her other hand holds on to Harry, swallowing thickly. She wasn't sure what she expected to find in the hall, but they were expressedly told to stay away for a reason.
Alas, they are Gryffindors.
And like any good Gryffindor, they don't run away.
She just isn't sure this man is the reason they have been told to stay away.
She waits for the answer, wondering who this man is, keeping herself in place.
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He steps closer to the pair, head tilted. The air around him is cold and damp and foul.
"Why have you disturbed me?"
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